Hacker News Reader

Comment by durandal1 | Hacker News Reader

Flipping through this magazine just made me realize how much I miss computer magazines and hacking culture in the 80s/90s.

View on HN

Indeed! Go wild: http://forth.org/fd/contents.html

Oh my! You found me a rabbit hole.

Exactly. I also miss the time when IT was much closer to the hardware without a gazillion of leaky abstractions.

I feel like this is part of why "IoT" is quite attractive and satisfying, even though you have modern tooling and bluetooth + wifi in a <$5 package nowadays, you're still writing code close to the metal.

Buggy leaky abstractions.

It's refreshing not seeing a single line of YAML.

or Haskal! Sorry, spotted your ID.

In 1985ish I did a silly Forth prog on a Speccy for parent's day at school. I'm just an honest syadmin these days but I think I made text along the lines of "This is a line of text" or "Today is Parent's Day" smoothly bounce around the screen and change colours in about 20 LOC. Please be charitable, this was 35 years ago and I'm no programmer and still lack imagination.

Flipping through the viewer made aware of how broken it was for anyone with a slow connection.

It's a link to a middle page on a PDF viewer in archive.org. It annoys me you can't do things better than that.

Not sure if there are official IA specs for such things but pretty much all of these old magazine scans tend to have a ZIP full of JPEG2000 images, which the IA will generate directory listings for:

https://archive.org/download/Forth_Dimension_Volume_06_Numbe...

From there you can hit those 'jpg' links next to each page, though the URLs can get pretty long:

https://archive.org/download/Forth_Dimension_Volume_06_Numbe...

It's 1985 and the slow connection was called postal service...you know that thing that broth you deadwood editions of pdf's.

>It annoys me you can't do things better than that.

Today you can, buy a faster connection or step on your government feet.

The great thing is, a lot of those old computers still work.

There is no reason not to boot them up and use them and enjoy the way they work.

Disclaimer: 30+ machines in my retro- collection. I will have to dust off the Jupiter Ace and have some Forth sessions at the next 'one page of code' challenge ..

Another disclaimer: lots of old hardware doesn't work anymore. The electrolytic caps evaporated ages ago and the failure modes can sometimes be spectacular. Commodore 64 power supplies for example tended to fail in a way where they would dump high voltage over the line and fry the attached machine.

Old chips can definitely go bad as well. However, many of the machines were simple enough that it's possible to diagnose and fix the problem with a bit of knowledge and some gumption.

My C-64 has a USB interface.

It's the one my dad bought in 1984 or so. Imagine the scene:

Me and my brother flew home to West Germany (Rheindahlen) from the UK (Army brats) for the Christmas hols. Dad proudly shows us the new computer and plugged the power into the video input. pop. About two months later we receive the repaired unit from NAAFI. Me and my brother went back to school for the spring term. Mum and Dad had not banked on the C64 as a main Chrimbo pressie for us and gave us other things. They clearly knew well ahead of time how IT will always screw up - they were clearly prescient types.

We absolutely loved it. I wont bore you any more with reminisces but I still have it and it still works.

Capacitors don't evaporate, they swell or blow if dodgy enough - long story, search it ("blown capacitors".)

My Apple 2 also has a USB interface.

I plan on recapping it soon.

It seems like every time I read about radio repair, one of the very first things I see is "watch out for old capacitors."

Electricity seems like one of those topics you really don't want to learn through experimentation with old hardware.

Of the 30+ machines in my collection, only a small handful have needed cap replacements. And, this is not such a big deal anyway - in fact its quite easy in most cases. Older computers have the advantage that they're quite a bit more accessible than the new stuff.

Much rather have to replace a cap than de-glue a touchscreen display ..

Reply on news.ycombinator.com